Windows 7 is about to retire

Microsoft is heralding the beginning of the end of Windows 7. The company will no longer maintain its aged operating system in three years from now. Then the support will be finally terminated.

Already two years ago Microsoft terminated the basic support of Windows 7 and the release of new features. Now they announced that after the 14th of January 2020 also security patches, updates and even technical support won't be available anymore. For the former Windows Vista, the support was terminated in April 2016. But the distribution of Vista is not significant anymore.

Many hardware manufacturers don't provide drivers for modern peripheral equipment such as printers or scanners for Windows 7 anymore. So you can't use them. One more reason is that the old operating system is based on an outdated software architecture and thus can't deal with nowadays security issues. So it is getting harder and harder to provide the necessary updates and security patches.

Windows 7 first was released in October 2009 as successor for Windows Vista, which was undoubtedly one of the biggest failures in history.The current spread of Windows 10, according to StatCounter, is about 12,54%. But Windows 7 still has the lead particularly with regard to desktop PCs. The old operating system is running on more then 40% of the machines – world wide.

Microsoft advices users to change to Windows 10. It provides state-of-the-art security technology and new software features. Furthermore only Windows 10 supports the latest generation of CPUs provided by Intel, AMD and Qualcomm. Also nowadays most software tools are developed for recent Windows builds.

According to Microsoft the migration process is very easy. After installing Windows 10, all your personal preferences and data is kept.